Municipalities of all sizes are implementing Smart & Safe Cities solutions, including using video to support public safety and security, and also to monitor things like traffic and pedestrian flow in public areas. In the private sector, businesses and retailers are also using video surveillance footage to monitor their premises, understand visitor foot traffic, and gather other business intelligence. While it’s clear video can play an important role in the day-to-day operations of cities and businesses, the real power of video content is being able to dive in, do the analysis, and come away with actionable information.

BriefCam has developed a video content analysis platform to scan vast amounts of video content and detect, extract and classify specific types of data including people, vehicles, objects and activities.

“What BriefCam does is effectively use video to help organizations understand what’s happening in their environment,” says Jeremy Krinitt, vice president of business development for BriefCam.

“One of the big challenges around video today is that there are thousands of cameras out there,” he says. “And with those thousands of cameras, there are millions of hours of video.”

The challenge for municipalities and other organizations gathering video is having the ability to drill down into all that footage to find the specific data they need, and to do it quickly. That data can range from the practical – such as bicycle traffic trends to help a city determine where to put a new bike path – to the critical – like finding a lost child.

5G’s impact on high-definition video

BriefCam has been experimenting with Verizon’s pre-commercial 5G technology at Alley, a co-working space and site of Verizon’s 5G incubator in New York City, to learn how tomorrow’s next-generation networks can give users the ability to sift through enormous amounts of video content and extract data rapidly. That will be especially important as camera technology evolves and higher-quality, higher-resolution video is available.

“5G can have a huge impact,” says Krinitt, “not only with increased bandwidth and reduced latency, but also by providing more detail in the video so that we can do what we do very accurately.”

Krinitt expects that, as 5G becomes commercially available, more use cases will come to fruition as well.

“I see, as we move into the future, 5G will really ‘open up the menu’ to accomplish what is the ideal.”

Verizon’s 5G incubator at Alley is giving BriefCam and other innovators access to pre-commercial 5G technology to develop and refine their 5G use cases.